


A Four-Year Degree in How to Lose Your Heart

by baroqueriot



Category: Wizards of Waverly Place
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-01
Updated: 2013-05-01
Packaged: 2017-12-10 03:04:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/781036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baroqueriot/pseuds/baroqueriot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex made a copy of Justin when she was in seventh grade, blackmailed her way into getting him a full college scholarship, and sent him off to get all the education his geeky heart could desire and then come home without ever having left. Except that meant there were two Justins, and Alex in the middle, and what seemed like a good idea at the time has become way too complicated for Alex's taste.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Four-Year Degree in How to Lose Your Heart

Alex Russo is just about to get the hell out of seventh grade when Justin goes and ruins everything, like he always does. She snuck into his room, hoping to catch him doing something interesting. He was looking at pictures, which seemed promising. "College brochures?" she asked out loud with evident disgust and disappointment, giving away her sneaky advantage.

“Four years and two months until I move out of here and go to Columbia. Or MIT. Or CalTech. Or there’s even this cool program at Buffalo University. Or anywhere not here,” he says with way too much excitement. He sees her forming the words to ask why he would ever want to do that. “There’s so much I can learn there. And no family asking me why I’d want to.”

That’s when it really hits her that Justin just accepts that he’s going to move away from her. What’s she supposed to do if he does that? Pick fights with _Max_?

What Alex does is find the spellbook Dad told them not to look at and drag it down from that locked cabinet in the lair. Justin thinks he needs to go away in a few years to get a degree; she can get that done for him. He should be appreciative. She’d sure be grateful to have someone tell her she didn’t have to do four years of school.

_Justin wants way too much education, bring me a copy of him from high school graduation._

And there’s her brother standing blinking in the lair, eighteen years old and wearing a suit for some reason. His hair looks a little better in the future.

He still looks like such a total doofus, though.

 

Freshman Year:

_Fall semester._

“It’s not that I’m not grateful, Alex,” Justin says carefully, struggling to find words, “it’s just that… college is expensive. And they expect you to pay or they don’t give you the degree. I think maybe you haven’t thought this out.”

“Oh, you’re here on full scholarship for four years,” Alex assures him. “I mean, sort of scholarship. It’s an informal scholarship. Sort of a… film studies scholarship.”

“I’m not into film studies, though,” he says, mystified. “I mean, I like old movies, but… why do that for your major?”

“Not _your_ film studies, idiot. You know that old movie, _Birth of a Nation_?”

“You mean the awful one with the people in blackface but it’s part of the film canon for its groundbreaking use of cross-cutting?” he says.

“That’s the one. And you know Rule 34?”

“’If it exists, there’s porn of it on the internet’?”

He’s blushing ferociously and if she weren’t in the middle of saying something she’d totally give him shit about it. “Turns out there’s also porn of it on the Dean of Admissions’ personal and office computers. Um, with some directorial license. Involving underage midgets.”

Ah, now _here’s_ the exact shade of  rosy blush she was waiting for. “I think I just lost my innocence,” Justin says distantly.

“Oh, I guess you haven’t looked at that file named ‘Robot Anatomy Notes’ I put on your computer, then,” Alex says. She shoves him a little while he chokes and gropes his pockets for an inhaler that isn’t there, because he isn’t actually asthmatic. Hell, she’s already about to lose it, thinking about when he finds that file and how he’ll break into audible personal argument over whether to delete it unseen, or let curiosity take over. Because she knows his urge to find out things is way too strong not to look. “Look, I printed off everything you need for your dorm and when to register for classes and the campus map and what else you can blackmail that dean with if it comes up. It’s all here.”

“Why can’t you care this much about your own education?” Justin asks. “I mean, if you put half this amount of effort into your own homework your grades would probably be almost as good as mine.”

She shrugs. “Why bother? You’ll actually get the degree. It’s gonna be a surprise if I even make it to graduation. At least under my own name. Shit, I’ll be shocked if I outlive the cab I was born in.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Don’t worry, Justin.” She leans over, standing just a little bit on tiptoes, and kisses him clumsily on the cheek. “I’ll make sure to call you when I know for sure that my fake passport will clear customs in at least two countries.”

 

_Spring semester._

Alex is in the middle of a really good dream about that new hot ninth-grader at school when her phone wakes her up, and she swears at it incoherently for a second before actually figuring out that there might be a person on the other end. An asshole in the first degree who deserves to die by being eaten by ferrets from the toes up, but a person. The display says JR Buffalo, and it takes her a second to remember that’s college Justin. She was going to program a funny name in like Dustin Gruesome or something, she just hadn’t gotten around to  it, okay?

“I’m going to kill you,” she says by way of greeting. Yes, it’s the kind of thing that loses its bite if overused, but she hasn’t heard any complaints.

There’s no answer to her threat. She chews her lip. To be honest, she hadn’t expected the spell to even last this long. Some melted pool of clone probably pocket-dialed her. “Justin?”

“I got my first B,” he says, and she could swear she just heard sniffles. “In organic chemistry. I got a B.”

“Wow, congratulations! I don’t even get grades that good in classes I’ve ever heard of before.”

“That’s _you_ , Alex. I don’t get grades lower than an A, or at least a B plus. Until now, apparently.” Alex hears him take a deep breath. “And I can’t even talk to Mom about it, or Zeke, or anybody. I’m not supposed to exist. You’re the only one I can talk to.”

Alex makes a face. Of _course_ she had forgotten something important. Like making sure she wasn’t his sole emotional lifeline. Balls. “Okay,” she sighs, “I’ll be right there. I’m bringing brownies.”

“I’m not sure if I’m really in the mood to eat right now—“

“Not for you, dorkface. I’m going to need some sugar if I’m going to spend the night with you.”

He sighs deeply, and, well, she’s given him enough time to turn down her offer of loving sisterly support. Fuck knows she’d rather go back to sleep. “See you soon,” Justin says, and hangs up.

It’s a good thing for him her dream hadn’t gotten to the best part yet or he wouldn’t have had a chance of her not going back to sleep. She grabs her wand from the nightstand.

He eats half the brownies, and they end up making a scrapbook that night. At least he has a chess club thing to be proud of.

 

Sophomore Year:

_Fall semester._

It’s a beautiful autumn day in Buffalo and Alex and her brother in college are out on a picnic blanket on the campus green, eating overpriced sandwiches from the food court and drinking the cheapest champagne, because Justin made himself a fake ID to enter a robotics competition, and Alex can think of way better things to do than  use a fake ID on robotics. There are no glasses, so they pass the bottle back and forth between them, snorting and coughing every time the fizz rises up and tries to explode into their noses. “It’s carbonated,” Justin tells Alex snootily the first time this happens, since she takes the first sip. When it happens to him, she repeats “It’s carbonated,” in the same voice, and he makes a face, and she flicks his shoulder, and he squeezes her knee too hard, and she sets the champagne aside to push him backwards, but he gets a grip on her wrist and pulls her over with him, and they may have smashed an egg salad sandwich somewhere in the process. Her face ends up buried awkwardly in his neck, and his knee shoots up so she’s pretty much between his legs. It isn’t like their tickling and roughhousing haven’t caused them to end up in this position a billion times before, without them thinking a thing of it. But this time, two girls are walking by and both Alex and Justin can overhear one girl say to her friend, “Ugh, that’s what dorm rooms are for.”

And suddenly, they can’t not think anything of it, anymore. Alex slowly pushes herself upright. “Sorry,” she mutters.

But they trade a look, and maybe it’s the champagne, but they can both tell that that how they look to everyone else is something they each wish they had never realized. Both of them have always wanted to find out everything, not caring what innocence they might lose along the way, but this time.... this time they would have rather not known.

 

_Spring semester._

It takes five rings before college Justin picks up his phone, and Alex could strangle him. She looks down. No, don’t think about killing her brother, bad thought. She glances at her hands, which she notices are shaking as if they were someone else’s hands. “C’mon, c’mon,” she mutters.

The first thing she hears, when the sixth ring cuts off in the middle, is the sound of ice cubes, and music in the background. “What’s up?” he says, too loudly. “I’m at a party!”

No shit, she wants to say. It took you a year and a half of college to get into a frat party? she could add. But she can’t. “I—I need your help. Um. Justin, I fucked up a spell, and Max—Max isn’t moving, I can’t tell if he’s breathing, Justin—“

The music fades a bit before Justin answers her. He must have stepped outside. “Alex, what did spell did you do? Isn’t there anyone closer?”

“No, there’s some school award thing for Justin, they’re all at it, I don’t know where it is, I don’t know what to do and he’s kinda blueish, and I’d call 911 except they don’t know what to do either, Justin please tell me what to do!”

“ _What spell did you do, Alex?_ ”

“He kept forgetting that I told him to stay out of the living room while I was there with Riley and so I did some spell that was supposed to use more of his brain to remember stuff, like _Cerebrum Dureanum_ or something.”

“ _Cerebrum Dureanum_? Alex, that one takes tons of preparation to do so that you don’t use your medulla oblongata for remembering passwords!”

“ _YOU’RE NOT SPEAKING ENGLISH AND MAX ISN’T BREATHING!_ ”

“There’s— there’s a spell to reverse turning him into a vegetable, it’s… it’s not a very good one but—“

“I don’t care, if this takes any longer it won’t matter how good the spell is.”

“Put your wand at the base of his skull. Back of the neck. Then say _reverse changed connections back to none, corpus callosum, cerebellum, cerebrum, done._ ”

She repeats after him, fumbling some of the terms. But hey, it’s the thought that counts, right? The spell is just there to focus her, and Alex doesn’t think she’s ever focused on anything as hard in her life as she’s focused  right now on her baby brother laying there so horribly still. She sees a slight glimmer on his eyelashes, a passing gold shadow skitter across his face. There’s a tiny buzzing sound, like an almost-snore, and it takes her a moment to realize he’s inhaling and exhaling again. “Come on, Maxie, wake up,” she begs.

“It’s a very clumsy spell,” Justin worries on the other end of the phone. “But since there’s no way to do precise brain mapping to reconnect everything right, I don’t know what else to suggest…”

“He’s breathing, but he hasn’t woken up yet,” Alex reports.

“That’s good! It may take a minute while everything, er, turns back on again. Hopefully the most important connections went back to the right places.”

Alex pushes some of Max’s hair back away from his eyes, and then he takes a deep breath and looks at her. “Everything smells funny,” he says slowly, like the words are coming from a long way away. “Kind of… blue.”

“He’s okay!” she tells Justin.

“Well,” says Justin, “he’s conscious, anyway. You’ll have to wait and see how much brain damage you caused him.”

“Oh, shut up, no one will notice, it’s not like he was very bright to start with,” Alex says scornfully, to fight down the knot in her stomach that says Justin might be right.

Max holds up a hand, where there is a brief gold glimmer where his nerves might be, and then the glow fades. “You’re right,” he says mournfully, “I’m not very bright.”

Later, when Max asks the Justin who is only sixteen what he was talking to Alex about on the phone when Max was asleep, Justin is confused, and then Max is confused, but nobody thinks it strange because Max is always a little confused. The way Max looks at Alex after that is a mix of knowing that she and Justin have a big, special secret, and a sort of wordless despondency that he will never be a part of it. It makes Alex feel like she’s gotten away with something, which normally makes her feel like the queen of the world, but this time, it feels like a big ball of relief and sadness and defensiveness  to carry around along with the secrets of how she created one brother and killed another. Even though she doesn’t like to think about the future, she can’t help but look forward to the day she puts the two Justins back together, and all those things she that carries can evaporate.

 

Junior Year:

_Fall semester._

One day when she gets bored with whatever class she has right before lunch (she’s been in it three weeks, she still doesn’t know what subject it is), she fakes dry heaves to get sent to the nurse, texts college-Justin (now labeled in her phone as Justine Dingledork, who she’ll claim is a Finnish exchange student if anyone asks) to pick up a burger from the campus grill for her, and flashes up to Buffalo.  All in all, she knows it doesn’t sound like a generally dependable way to get lunch, but she has his class schedule so she knows that he has to head back to his room to pick up books for his next class. While she waits in his room for food, she looks around to see if there’s anything worth pilfering, and sees nothing more than a small pile of books that looks so horrifically boring that she feels compelled to look inside, just to see if they’re hollowed out or at least thoroughly vandalized. When she finds that they aren’t, it’s pretty much unbelievable and she skims the pages of one to see what’s so great about it. The main character appears to be Dean Moriarty, which is a weird coincidence, and it looks like it’s all about road trips and sex and drugs or something, so maybe the coincidence isn’t so weird, because yeah, that’s Dean. Okay, this book might be alright, maybe.

The next one is thicker, enough to bludgeon someone with and definitely large enough to hollow out. _Atlas Shrugged_. She vaguely recalls Mr. Laritate mentioning something about it and essays and college scholarships, but since Mom and Dad will probably have blackmailed her into the Air Force by the time college rolls around, she had tuned out. It looks like a terrible book, so she flips to the end to see if there are at least explosions, and all she sees is some long lecture by someone who sounds like a total self-righteous asshole. And, taped to the last page, a plastic bag with something greenish and crumbling inside.

“Alex, what are you doing with my stuff!?”

“Weed, Justin?” she asks, grinning and holding it up. “I’m _so_ disappointed in you—no, wait, disappointed isn’t the word, it’s the other one…”

He snatches it from her hand. “It’s for medicinal use. It helps me concentrate instead of getting worried about things all the time. I don’t just sit around getting high.”

Alex snorts. “You are officially the least fun person I have ever met. But then again, I can’t believe you’re not nervous enough to start throwing up at just the sight of pot.”

“Maybe I’m changing,” he says, and tucks the bag into his back pocket. “Maybe I’m not exactly the same person as the Justin you copied two years ago.” When she looks at him, maybe it’s the light, but she can almost believe him: his hair is a little longer though not an awkward bowl cut, he fills out his shirt a little differently, his desperation to be liked and validated and perfect don’t float quite so close to the surface as they do in the brother she’s used to.

Suddenly things feel weird, and not as funny as they did before. “Have you seen what you read? You totally are,” she says, trying to recover. She waves _Atlas Shrugged_ at him.

“Just because it doesn’t have pictures—“

“I can guess that it’s a terrible book even without pictures.”

“Well, I think it has some interesting ideas. Not that you’d ever bother with learning a five-syllable word like ‘Objectivism’. Do you want your burger or not?”

What a question. Like food isn’t always better than philosophical discussions, or contemplations of self-determination or whatever. “Yeah, great. Aren’t you late for your next class?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school at all?” Justin counters.

The burger’s a little dry. “Well, I have a latte back in my locker getting cold, so I might as well,” she says, and flashes back to Tribeca Prep, in time to get drafted into volunteering for the Peter Pan play that her brother thinks he has to direct if he wants to get into college.

Justin’s always been the one to know everything, so it’s unsettling to look at him and be aware of how little he knows of what she’s doing. It’s just that, sometimes her stomach lurches when she thinks too hard about it all, and Alex wonders exactly how little she’s aware of what she’s doing, too. (But she’s never let that bother her before, right?)    

 

_Spring semester._

Alex wants to watch really terrible television instead of doing her history homework, but Justin is taking up the TV to watch some stupid documentary about scientists smashing things in France, or maybe Switzerland. Alex would normally be all about smashing things, but apparently these things are too small to see, so: boring. Harper is also watching it, not because she wants to learn about smashing things (she never does, for some reason) but because she still can’t believe her luck at moving in with the guy she has a crush on. Alex would like to transfer them both to another dimension and take over the couch, but she left her wand up in her room and she’d have to walk upstairs to get it, and back downstairs, and figure out a spell, and make popcorn, and Jesus that is way too much work.

It’s easier to walk upstairs, flash to college-Justin’s room, and take over his television. He doesn’t mind too much that she sprawls on his futon while he’s doing his homework, clearly, because if he did mind he would do more than shoot her exasperated glares for awhile before giving up and joining her, bringing with him a few more pillows for them to lie on. Even with the futon bars digging a little bit into her back, it’s still a lot more comfortable than sitting between Harper and the other Justin and laughing about the word _Hadron_. Comfortable enough that she starts to drift off to sleep, and stops herself before she can, because if she falls asleep here, in the morning when she doesn’t wake up in her own bed, she’ll catch hell from Mom. Again.

But it would be so much nicer to stay.

So when she rolls over onto him to give him a quick hug goodbye before flashing home, Justin’s just the guy she’s been watching TV with and he feels like any guy and feels like a guy that she’s comfortable with and so with even fewer second thoughts than usual (shut up, it’s possible) she’s curled up on his chest and kissing him and barely realizing she’s doing so until it has undoubtedly been happening. Until Justin is pulling away and her mind is as blank as when Mom wants her to say something in Spanish _and oh for god’s sake Mom is the last person she wants to think of right now._

Her brother looks at her, and she must be in another world entirely because she can’t figure out what he’s thinking. And, oh yeah, because she just had her tongue in her brother’s mouth. She has a hard time emphasizing that part where he’s _her brother_ quite enough.

Then Justin puts his hands on her shoulders and pushes her back onto her side of the futon, and leans over her. When his lips meet hers, he’s not a little too unsure of where to put his hands, like Dean, or too careful to avoid much contact, like Riley and his dry kisses. Justin is… pretty much what she’d expect from living with a guy who knows her inside and out for sixteen years. Except… she hasn’t. This isn’t the Justin she shares a bathroom with, the brother whose room she’s been exploding things in lately to make him mad and distract him from mooning over that new girl Juliet, the one who would never ever think of her as anything but a little sister and would definitely not be making out with her right now (and especially wouldn’t be sliding his fingers under her shirt and up over her ribs). This is… just someone who looks exactly like him.

Sure, that rationale works.

 

Senior Year:

_Fall semester._

Justin’s apartment is chilly with Alex wearing only a bikini, and she wraps her arms around herself as she waits for Justin to be ready to go. She’s going with him and his friends to the lake on the last weekend before the semester starts, and she just found beach sand in her bathing suit, and she knows where that sand came from.  The last time she wore this bikini, she had just wished her family back together like they were before, exactly as her parents had met the first time. The thing about being back to normal is actually having to be normal again, so they had gone to be on the beach, Max trying to dive for sea turtles he could ride, Alex working on her tan, Justin reading a book that had way too many words and too few pictures to be read in the months between May and September. Alex rested her head on Justin’s thigh as he read, since she didn’t have a rolled-up towel to use instead, and he absentmindedly combed his fingers through her hair, and if either of them were inclined to think that, after days of fighting for each other and for their lives, they needed a safe space to simply lay in the sand in contact with each other’s tangibility, they didn’t admit it out loud. 

In the present, the older Justin emerges from his bathroom wearing swim trunks and a t-shirt, and grabs his sunglasses and towel before reaching for her hand. His hand is warm and large around hers, and Alex can easily imagine that it belongs to the brother who she just fought the world to keep with her. It’s the first time she’s recognized that feeling inside her as _wanting_ to imagine such a thing.

“Ready to get moving?” he asks, drawing her close and bumping her hip with his.

“I think I am,” she says.

 

_Spring semester._

It was a little after she started going out with Mason that a lot of other things went to shit.

It was afternoon, before the university semester started back up again but after Alex’s school had begun, and Justin’s room was downright wintry since he was too cheap to turn up the thermostat, and so the two of them lay under the piled-up blankets and continued to sleep the afternoon away. It was a much better option than getting up to find their clothes. Alex wiggled against Justin, scooting her way far up enough to kiss him. He didn’t open his eyes, but slid a hand downwards, across the small of her back.

“You kiss a lot better than Mason,” Alex murmurs. “He’s a bit… drooly.”

“Serves you right, dating a werewolf,” Justin replies. But there’s a hitch in his voice, or some odd echo.

“Well, back at home, you’ve been dating a vampire who sucks the jelly out of donuts. Did you know I formed a betting pool on how much kinky shit you two bores _weren’t_ getting into?”

Justin ignores her, shifting down further beneath the covers  to start firmly planting kisses up her breastbone, while his hands move southward. “You might have been surprised,” he says, but just then he slides two of his fingers just right, and Alex isn’t sure she gives a damn about Juliet or whatever she kept down in that dungeon bedroom of hers.

“Fuuuuuuck,” escapes involuntarily from Alex’s lips after a second.

“That’s the plan,” Justin says.

“You and your planning.” Just then, he does something a little spontaneous, and she twists and arches and everything inside her starts combusting. “Hope you plan on keeping that trick when I move your brain back.”

Thank Christ he is distracted enough by what she’s doing with her own hands that she can enjoy the moment before he starts sputtering, “Wait, what?”

She lets the rhythm, the quivering settle down before she answers. “It’s only a few months to graduation and then you stop existing. Maybe real Justin will remember everything we did. I hope so. Mason just does not even compare, even if he is sweet.”

Justin rolls over onto his back, away from her, and she misses the contact of his skin on hers. “Well it sounds like you’re set when it comes to people to get you off,” he says bitterly.

“It’s not like you and I are married. I can’t see just you. And.... and I think that there-- that I might-- that maybe the Justin at home is someone... that we might... oh you know,” she finishes irritably.  

“And I guess how I feel about you --the me that has just spent four years becoming a different person than your brother-- doesn’t factor into any of your plans or thoughts.”

Oh god. It was like Manny all over again.

“Like you’re not seeing anyone else!” Alex exclaimed, rolling over so he could see the full face of her annoyance. “Sure, we can just go parade in front of everyone and tell them we’re going out. Hey, guys, I made a copy of my brother and then we started fucking! There’s only so much we get to have out of this, Justin. Don’t make a thing about how you have girlfriends and I have a boyfriend.”

“Do you think this is about jealousy?” Justin demands. “Do you really? I have feelings, Alex. I have goals. For all that you piss me off, you’re still the girl I want to be with. And, copy or not, you _know_ the only thing I have ever really wanted was to be taken seriously. But you— you act like I’m not real.”

“That’s because you’re _not_!”

The words come out harsher than she meant them, but she does mean them, and as the silence in the room swells that is the only thing keeping her from diffusing it by taking the words back. She climbs out of bed, reaching for her clothes and putting them on blindly. She thinks her tshirt goes on backwards. “In five months,” she says, “this whole college thing is over. And I don’t know what happens then, I just know that there is only going to be one Justin. So, yeah, if I treat Mason like he’s my real boyfriend because he is, and I’m trying to pretend like something real didn’t happen with me and the real Justin last summer, it’s just because they’re going to last. I have to live with them. It’s not like this hasn’t been fun, but after May, I might be the only person who remembers it, so I kinda think I should get to decide what I’ll have to remember.”

“And what if you’re not? What if you combine us, and I remember everything, and you’ve pulled away from me for nothing? You think that’s something you can fix?”

Alex scoffs. “Right. When have you ever known one of my spells to work that well?”

But he doesn’t concede her very valid point, just rubs his forehead and looks at the bookshelf like it holds answers.  “This is what you do, Alex,” he says, propping himself up in bed and crossing his arms and fixing a look on her. Somehow this is worse than his usual anxious freakouts. She’d rather he shouted and waved his arms around. “You don’t even think before bringing something to life, whether it’s a duplicate of yourself, or a mannequin, or a taxi, you just give it life and a mind full of emotions and dreams and wants, all to escape dealing with your own problems. And then when it actually starts acting like a living thing, you just get rid of it. Doesn’t that bother you? Even a little?”

Maybe it does. Maybe she’d know if it did if she had really thought about it. Which is, in itself, a rather good reason not to really think about things. She’s so tired, all of a sudden, tired of talking and looking at him and seeing how her marvelous plan worked out just how she wanted it, how her super-smart brother got everything he dreamed of, how the arms she fits in so perfectly are there to hold her, how the future should just be dizzyingly bright with promise, and how it is all so completely, utterly fucked.

“And what am I supposed to do about it?” she says. “What can I do that isn’t exactly what I’m doing?”

But Justin, who always has all the answers, who is there for her just _to_ have all the answers, does not answer her. There is something hot and prickling happening behind her eyes. “I’ll fix this,” she tells him. “I’ll do it right. And everybody will be real. We’ll have everything. Just let me fix this.” Her eyes narrow. “ _I will fix this_.”

“Maybe I won’t show,” Justin threatens. He is stubborn and she refuses to beg with the puppy-dog eyes, not this time. “Maybe I’ll go start my own life, without you. Be in musicals in Canada or something.”

“You’ll show up,” she says darkly, and flashes out before he can get in the last word.

And, to keep the last word, she doesn’t talk to him for five months, not even when he texts her pictures from the road trip he’s taking because senioritis, it turns out, is even worse when there’s a chance you might not even exist after graduation.

 

Graduation Day: **Bioinformatics and Computational Biology - B.S., Buffalo University**

_Morning._

“Look, Justin,” she hisses into the phone. “I don’t care about the goddamn open road that you’re leaving behind. I don’t care about how much you are over seeing me. I don’t even care that you lost my favorite bra when you packed up your room. This day, that is happening right now, that my brother is writing his speech for right now, was the entire reason I put your ass through college, and you can’t even dream of how much of a living hell I can make your life if you don’t show up today.”

“Hell is just a state of mind,” Justin informs her. “As is graduation.”

“You’ve seen inside my brain before,” Alex says dangerously. “Think a ‘state of mind’ is something you want to fuck with?”

She hopes he’s thinking of what happened when she had a duplicate of herself to get rid of. “I’ll be there,” he replies. “I won’t like it.”

“No one’s asking you to,” she snaps, and hangs up on him. God, he’s such an asshole. She rubs her eyes. It doesn’t matter what she can’t make herself stop feeling for—well, for Justin. It’s all going to be fixed soon, everybody is going to think she’s wonderful for getting Justin a college degree for high school graduation, and she can stop flashing up to Buffalo for… well, sex and arguments aren’t things she objects to in general, but the ridiculous jealousy that keeps coming up. Between clone Justin and brother Justin and Mason. And it’s not even jealousy, which is the worst part, because jealousy she understands. This is college Justin, who should understand complicated things, not understanding reality.

He gets to live in college-land and make up bullshit philosophy statements. She has to live in reality where love is just something she screws up because she tries to get everything she wants, every time, and maybe she should have learned better by now. But what is she, Justin?

 

_Afternoon._

College Justin shows up high as the fucking space station and rambling something probably from that On The Road book. If quoting another Dean Moriarty is supposed to be a comment on her life or whatever, it’s clearly a wasted effort. He hits on Harper, of all people, right in front of her, and Harper is trying to look like that chick out of the Sherlock Holmes movie for god’s sake. Also, if Alex happens to think of one more book reference she’s probably going to have a stroke, because that is just not natural.

And THEN after she combines the two Justins --incorrectly, of course-- without even saying a thing about how it feels like she’s stabbing herself in the chest, she finds him behind the auditorium smoking even _more_ weed –wow, she really underestimated the effect the whole situation is having on him—and has to drag him home. “Look, Alex, like, being stoned in another body only lasts so long,” he protests when she finds him. She finishes off the last of what’s left in the bowl and dumps it out. It’s not like he’s the only one having a rough day. Then she takes him home and tries not to giggle inappropriately at anything (as things become less and less funny, this becomes more and more difficult) and Justin corners their parents with some stoner wisdom before stumbling outside.

Dad won’t even tell her what book to start looking for a spell in, which is even more unfair than having to solve her own problems; isn’t he supposed to be her teacher or something? She _has_ someone to solve her problems: Justin. Only he’s out on the terrace trying to nap and conjure some pancakes with peanut butter and ignore her, which means _she_ has to be the responsible one, and what kind of fucked-up world would work like that?

“I don’t see what I’m going to get out of helping you,” Justin mumbles, shading his eyes, when she goes outside and asks if he’ll help her track down a spell.

“The satisfaction of being the one with all the right answers?”

He considers this. “Nope, think I’ve already got that.”

“I won’t tell Mom and Dad what you’ve been smoking.”

“That sort of blackmail only works if it’s something they haven’t figured out themselves, dear _sister_ ,” he points out, emphasizing the last word, and she doesn’t like his tone in combination with his understanding of blackmail, so she leaves.

It’s becoming clear that this whole thing was just a bad idea and she wants to undo it all. There’s probably some spell somewhere that will let her go tell her seventh-grade self to not be an idiot, but that would be even more work to look up, so she’s just hoping to find one that will get rid of all of his college knowledge. That’ll take care of Justin being an asshole about her treating him like a copy, it’ll take care of the blackmail material, and he’ll still have a college degree, woohoo best present ever, Alex is the best daughter ever, _this plan cannot fail_.

But of course it does, when she finally catches up to him at the graduation ceremony and casts the spell.

 Okay. So Justin is not acting right, and, god, why anyone would have a problem with that she doesn’t know because there is no way she could have made Justin’s personality WORSE, right? Anyway, not that she’ll tell anyone (duh) but she’s becoming deeply afraid she might have seriously and in reality broken Justin’s brain. That it might be all her fault.

Apart from the whole spell thing that she did and broke his brain and it’s all her fault. Obviously. But screwing up spells is just normal so no one should even blame her for that.

But clearly she had underestimated how much of a shock it would be to the real Justin, who was still moping over Juliet, to find out that he had been boning his sister for the past two years, along with getting a degree and smoking a lot of weed and blogging about Ayn Rand. Or maybe the spell had just gone wrong. That was more likely to be the case on the basis of it happening all the damn time, or at least she thinks that’s how probability works. She kinda used statistics class to catch up on the sleep she wasn’t getting in art class.

And the absolute _last_ thing she is going to think about is how Justin earned some stupidly smart degree that she can’t even remember the name of and now he probably couldn’t even pass first grade. The valedictorian speech and the procession across the stage is a disaster, of course --she TOLD him he should have used her “later, losers” speech-- but at least Mom and Dad weren’t there to see it. They know she’s done something wrong. But there’s Alex fucking shit up, and then there’s _this_. So she’d rather they just assume she did the normal kind of fucking shit up, because it’s a lot easier to explain a misfired spell. She has a lot of practice.

When they get home, Max watches over Justin, who’s even dumber than he is. They’re running up and down the upstairs hall with their shirts off, shooting Nerf darts at each other and seeing which will stick. Alex goes to the lair to do more research.

Alone in the lair, nobody knows that Alex cries. But that’s what she does, isn’t it? She loses Justin entirely and it’s all her fault. And so she cries. But no one can know.

She mops up her face with a sweater Justin left behind the table, getting some snot on it, and finds the book she used back in seventh grade to copy him in the first place. The cabinet it came from is still locked; Dad never got around to unlocking it and teaching them any spells from that book, she doesn’t think. It, like, isn’t her fault she never even learned that spell to fix the copy. It might have made sense to try that before, but whatever, she makes stuff up on the spot and solves problems as they come, and her problem before was getting rid of an asshole. Which she was successful at, thank you very much.

Alex finds the spell she used all those years ago almost immediately; she can remember exactly what it was like to be so young, and so afraid to  be alone forever. It’s funny (not) how things just don’t change. And there it is, so simple: right next to the spell she used is its opposite, the spell for merging the copied brains with variations for overriding one brain’s knowledge and for putting the combined knowledge in one brain. She memorizes the latter one, hoping that the brains are still combined and that they’re just suppressed, grabs an ancient lollipop from underneath the table, and goes careening up the stairs to lure Justin onto the couch.

It works. Somehow, for once, it goes right and it works and sweet fuck he is back, her brother is back, and she can’t help but grab him and fiercely bite her tongue to stop the questions that plague her. This is not the place. And he was so angry, before. This is not the time. All that matters is that Justin is back. She wishes she knew what she could say. (I’m still in love so don’t hate me.)

Obviously she can’t get the words out—she’s Alex Russo, not some idiot girl who goes around telling people she’s in love with them, usually— but there are things she does say. How she can’t imagine not having him around to fight with (especially if there’s great sex afterward. Or during). How she always had the best intentions. And maybe that would be enough, but then Mom has to accuse them of loving each other, and Alex’s heart stutters in panic _–oh god she knows—_ and it must be nothing compared to the alarm she sees in Justin’s eyes as he launches himself back on the couch, away from her. She does the same, since following Justin’s lead is okay when all other plans fail, but now nothing is clear to her, nothing at all.

 

_Evening._

After Mom and Dad go to bed, quietly trying to talk each other into being okay with being bad parents

(which, Alex thinks, they’d never do if they actually knew how bad their parenting really was), Alex gets tired of sitting on the couch staring at the TV (which is off) and listening to the rain hit the windows, after the sunshine of the afternoon gave way to weather more befitting her feelings. She trudges upstairs, pushes Justin’s door open. She doesn’t go in, just stands there. She has to. She doesn’t know what walking into his room is going to mean anymore.

“What, Alex?” Justin says eventually.

“Do you hate me?” she asks. “For what I did?”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

At that, she has to press her lips together to keep from starting to cry. She was really trying to avoid that. When he sees her face, Justin drops the superior expression he had been maintaining and only takes a second to jump off the bed, cross the room, pull her inside, and shut the door behind her. He cups her face in his hands and kisses her forehead. “Alex. I will never hate you. I couldn’t.”

Alright, so, just because there are tears escaping doesn’t mean she has to talk about them or anything. She grabs a handful of the front of his shirt and wipes it across her face. “Then what was all that ‘you can’t have love without hate’ bullshit you were telling Zeke?”

Justin looks confused for a moment. “Wha--? Oh, he was trying to figure out what to write in yearbooks and wanted something meaningful. I thought I’d give him a headache, he’d given me one.”

Alex actually feels a little sorry for Zeke, which is new, and repeats to Justin what he always says to her and Harper, when they tease Zeke for needing a routine, for being obsessive, for being bad with people. “You shouldn’t do things like that to him. It’s not something he can help.” She has sympathy for having something in your brain that makes you behave in ways even you can’t fully understand. Not that her causing everything to go wrong just to do something nice for the brother she’s apparently in love with really ranks with Zeke’s Asperger’s (holy hell, what a sentence), but she can say that everybody really needs some of the wiring fixed inside their heads. One look at Max reminds her it’s better not to try, though.

“I know,” he says. “I forgot.”

And the way he says that he forgot makes her stomach drop to about the region of her feet in a way she had thought for years might happen, and yet the advance warning hadn’t done a thing to lessen the sensation. “How much did you forget?” she asks him dully, because no matter what he says, she can’t have the best of all worlds, and he can’t have remembered quite as much of the past four years as she can.

He reaches for her hand. “Let’s go out of the terrace,” he says. “I want to try something, and besides, who knows what anybody might overhear.”

So he wants to be in public view. Well that indicates her chances of getting laid tonight, Alex speculates, letting him lead her down the spiral staircase and out the back door. “It’s raining,” she complains. Justin takes out his wand.

And then, she’s not getting drenched anymore. She looks around to see a giant bubble, the rain running down around the sides. “You need to make one of these next time we go to the aquarium,” she tells Justin.

He doesn’t say anything, but sits on one of the lounge chairs. She hesitates, not knowing where to sit, and he tucks his legs up and pats the end of the chair. She sits.

“I learned some stuff about lightning in one of my physics classes,” Justin says.

Alex makes a face. “You mean you can stretch physics over more than one class?”

He ignores this, of course, and continues, while pointing his wand up, “I’ve been wanting to try this with magic ever since I learned about it.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I wanted to wait for you to see it.”

He does some sort of complicated twist with his wand, holding it to the surface of the bubble, and says, “Sky to ground, ground to sky, lightning rod, don’t let us fry.”

Well, that’s some slightly terrifying wording. “You sure about this?” Alex asks.

“Nope.” Justin grins. “Thought we’d find out.”

And then several bolts of lightning strike, but they don’t reach inside the protective bubble. Instead, electricity crackles all around them, almost too bright a flash to look at, and the two of them are silent inside a giant ball of light.

“That was beautiful,” Alex says quietly, when it fades.

Justin sets his wand down, and they don’t speak. Alex looks at her hands. The quiet stretches on except for the lashing of rain against their shield. Alex often speaks the first thing that comes into her head, but nothing is coming into her head, only the sound of Justin saying _I forgot_.

“It’s really hard to sort out my memories right now,” Justin says, finally. “I remember writing my valedictorian speech this morning. I remember taking my History final last week and Zeke freaking out afterward when he found out Stalin was a bad guy.”

“Yeah, the whole school’s taking that pretty rough,” Alex nods. She has no idea who Stalin is, but whatever.

“But I also remember that happening ages ago. I remember that I haven’t talked to Zeke in four years, I remember the kegger last week after I came back for finals and I hooked up with Jennifer Bialoski because I was way too drunk to see straight.”

Alex totally isn’t jealous. Nope. Not the time, anyway. “So you have weird memories. So. Um. Do you remember all... all that happened in college?”

“Not most of organic chemistry,” he admits, and she pounds his knee. “Most of it. It’s a little jumbled.” He pauses. “I remember why we fought in January.”

Suddenly Alex doesn’t want to be in this conversation, not anymore, why did she have to bring this up? They could have just spent the rest of their lives in awkward avoidance and never seen each other again except at holidays. That would have totally been just fine, and she just would have used wine and avoidance to not have personal conversations and then they would both die of old age and boom, problem solved. “You weren’t the same as Manny,” she finds herself saying. “Not to me. The last thing I wanted was to just get rid of you.”

“What did you want, then?” There’s a bit of tension in his voice, the tension from five months previous.

“Everything,” she says. “I wanted you to have your degree. I wanted to make the Justin here happy. I wanted both of you, and for everyone to get what they wanted, and I made it all happen. Except I knew I’d fuck it up like I always do, so instead of everything being perfect it was all wrong.”

He reaches out a hand, maybe to touch her cheek, but then lets it drop before it touches her. “You always want everything,” he says, and she has to look away. “No, Alex-- not like, not in a bad way. Well, yes, in a bad way, but not... cruel. You don’t want to give anything or anyone up, in case they get hurt. But there’s too much of it for you to handle, so you take shortcuts. Magic goes haywire, if you take too many shortcuts, though.”

“So I’m a good-hearted fuckup. Got it.” Alex huffs a sigh. “And if intentions mattered, everything would be okay, instead of... instead of you having a mess of memories in your head and me stuck with, like, feelings crap I shouldn’t even have, because dating a werewolf is kinda living life on the edge already.” The New York skyline is the same as it ever is, through the semi-opaque lightning ball still shimmering around them, and what right does it have, being so unchanging when she can’t stop all the changes, and all the people time tries to steal away from her. “I intended to make this work, I tried to put everything in order so you’d get the education  you wanted, and still. I never knew for sure how much you’d remember when I put you and him back together. I wasn’t trying to hurt you. It's just all so stupid.”

“What?” he reaches out to tilt her chin his direction and look her in the face. “Are you sure you’re my sister? Admitting that your poorly thought-out plan might have been less carefully planned than you had assumed?”

“Me not being your sister would make half our problems go away, which means there’s not a chance of it, we’re not that lucky.”

“No, I guess not,” Justin replies. “We had shitty luck in the islands, but we still got Mom and Dad back. We’ve got probably one of the worst sandwich shops in Manhattan, but we can live off it, and we probably would have all stopped talking to each other years ago because of the competition if we didn’t have to work together there. You’ve got your best friend living with us, because her parents are awful. Maybe not being lucky isn’t the end of the world.”

“I’m not sure I care about the world,” Alex says. “I... fuck you, Justin, if you’re going to make me say things out loud. Not my style, you know that.”

“I’m Alex Russo and I’m too self-conscious even in private to admit that I’m totally in love with Justin and need him all the time for fixing spells and also banging,” Justin says in a fake high voice that sounds absolutely nothing like her. It’s the worst impression ever.

“Oh my god,” she says, “you have known me for... okay, with doubled timelines I don’t even know how many years, and _that_ is the best impression you can do of my voice?”

“It turns out I have a thing for nerds after all because Justin’s _so_ hot and I looooove--”

She cuts him off with a kiss. It’s clumsy and she kind of collapses on top of his knees but the important thing is that it shuts him and his stupid mouth up.

She pushes away just as fast. “Fuck,” Alex says, “ _fuck_. I mean, since we didn’t have this conversation in your bedroom I guess I can assume that- well, that that’s over.”

“You want to know another cool thing about the electrotransference properties of  this spell?” Justin asks.

“If it involves science, no.”

“Nobody can see in. And it’s soundproof. Unlike our bedroom walls.”

“That is a cool science fact about this spell,” Alex says.

“And in my bedroom, maybe somebody could hear me say that I know you want to keep me. All the versions of me, with you. And I like that. I thought for awhile that people are better on their own, but... it’s not true. You and I are always better together.” He pauses. “Especially if we’re naked, but, also, all the other times, too.” He tugs at her arm, and she shifts so that she can drape across his lap, lazily kissing him as they lean back against the lounge chair.

“Good,” says Alex, resting her forehead against his chest. “You’d be a dumbass, otherwise.”

He kisses the top of her head. “You know me, I can’t have that.”

“Yeah,” she answers. “I know you.”


End file.
